California had been in a financial crisis. The state’s money had gone away. This frequently happened within state governments: low tax rates, mismanagement of funds, inefficient programs… whatever the reason California was often out of cash. But this time California had gone into the gutter for a completely different reason.

If Schwarzenegger’s movie career had taught him one thing it was that when disaster strikes you need an action hero, a plan, and lots of fire power. And Schwarzenegger had secretly diverted state funds for just that purpose. There was a reason California had no money and it was because its Governor spent it all on an army of androids that were housed all over the caverns of California. At Schwarzenegger’s command they would emerge and save California and perhaps a section of Nevada and a couple acres of Mexico.

As the world fell apart around him, he had to be the chess player that he was raised. If he launched his drone army too soon they could be wiped out. He wanted the alien invaders to tire from their attack. Then he would strike. He feared if the aliens had travelled the galaxies their robots would be better than his.

Perhaps he should advance them in waves? But he wasn’t a general. He didn’t have a map with toys on it to go over his plan. He just had his instincts. The same instincts that made him agree to appearing in Jingle All The Way. And that made him nervous as hell.

“Hillary,” Paul said, “we have to put our differences aside and work through this one.”

“Work through what?” Hillary asked.

“You see that smoke over there?” Palin gestured.

Saddam cut through the jibber jabby with his British inflected Iraqi accent.

“A Polaris space station crashed. I went and checked it out before you arrived. I believe it to have a nuclear missile attached. It looks… unstable. “

Clinton took out her iPhone. She scrolled through a couple things. “Polaris space stations don’t carry nukes.”

“Who told you that?” Saddam asked.

“The CIA.” Clinto held up her iPhone’s CIA app.

Saddam made a bemused face, “Ah yes, the same folks who discovered my weapons of mass destruction? Come, Hillary, we have a nuke to disarm.”

“Otherwise the whole island could explode,” Ron Paul added.

“Or worse,” Saddam said as he vanished into the Island’s forest. The three followed the former Iraqi leader.

Chapter 17
Brad Pitt’s ’92 Civic lay in tatters. Neither Pitt, Senator John McCain, or that guy who played Rueben Kincaid on The Partridge Family could figure out how to change the timing belt.

“You should have changed that thing 60,000 miles ago,” McCain sniped at Pitt, “Who just farted? That you Kincaid?”

That guy who played Rueben Kincaid on the Partridge family had no idea how he got to this gas station, what his real name was, or worse, how he was going to get out of the situation. He wished, deeply wished, wished so hard that his signature pout went up a couple notches, that the Partridge Family Bus would just pull up and take him back to TV land.

Apparently he wished too hard and another cream cheese fart slid out of his rear like a fat kid between two narrow couches going for free ice cream.

“Kincaid! “ McCain yelled at first in anger, then in as if the broken wind was strong enough to knock a memory loose, McCain screeched in joy, “Kincaid!”

McCain took inventory of all the Civic’s parts that lay in the hot desert sun.

“Boys,” McCain said and then looked at Pitt, “and Girls, we’re going to build a rocket.”

“Enough with calling me a girl, McCain.”

“I’m sorry, What branch of the military did you serve?”

“None,” Pitt answered.

“Then you’re a girl,” McCain shot back, “or a Marine.”

“Ladies!” Kincaid interrupted, playing along, “Before we build anything, we might have to be killed.” On the horizon a wave of dust approached the gas station.

All three squinted their eyes as they noticed mixed into the dust were glints of metal.

“Robots,” Kincaid whispered.

“We got to get out of here,” Pitt exclaimed and ran off.

McCain shook his head, “Thanks Eliza-brad.”

Kincaid picked up a tire iron, “Never in all my days did I think I’d go out like this.”

McCain stuffed a Tiger Milk bar in his mouth and unsheathed his machete, “Welcome to the party, pal.”

Pitt ran back, “Fellas, there’s a plane behind the gas station!”

“Kincaid!” McCain scorned.

“I didn’t know!”

All three ran back to the small cropduster.

It was a tight squeeze but Kincaid and Pitt fit in the passenger seat as McCain hopped into the pilot’s seat.

Thanks to my old college friend Geoff Wood who supplied the first sentence.

Chapter 1
Crazed with loneliness and impotent dreams of revenge, John McCain slapped the snooze button twice. The elder statesman of a broken nation lay awake, himself in tatters. He wasn’t tired. He just didn’t feel like fighting the world today. The $65 a night hotel that he had moved into after his failed presidential bid smelled of bad television and wrapped him up in a warm stench of feet. He wish he could slap the voters like he had just slapped his cheap CVS alarm clock.

Then the alien robots invaded.

McCain stuffed down a Tiger Milk bar and reached for his machete. It was going to be a long day. A damn long day, he thought.

Chapter 2Ten minutes before the aliens hit, former Senator John Edwards was orbiting the planet in his secret Polaris space station, a slick piece of Czech craftmanship Edwards had bought at a surplus sale from the European Space Agency, to get away from his scorned wife.

From his celestial view, former Senator Edwards was the first human to see the invading crafts shoot from behind the moon and zig zag down Earth’s atmosphere like beads of rain on a windshield.

“Robots,” he mumbled to himself. Perhaps he had once last chance to be a hero. He finished off his Tang, rubbed out his cigar, and activated the onboard nukes.

“Party time,” Edwards solemnly exclaimed as he began to steer the craft in a rapid descent. Next stop, Boom-Town.

Chapter 3When the robots hit, President Barack Obama had finally come up with a fool proof plan to clean up the oil spill in the gulf. A fool-proof plan, but these alien robots weren’t fools. As he stared at multiple screens deep below in the Capitol’s War Room, the President’s stomach sank. “Why did I have to be the alien robot invasion president?” Obama reached for a pack of Kools.

“Because it had already been decided, five thousand years ago.”

Obama’s cigarette dangled from his lower lip in surprise as former Vice President Dick Cheney rolled out of the shadows, wrapped in a monastic robe.

“And now my plan has come to be!”

The secret service descended on Cheney, but with a wave of the former Vice President’s hand all of their guns flew into the air and crunched into a ball as if the forces of magnetism had just been sold to the highest bidder.

Obama immediately pushed the intercom button.

“Get Ralph Nader on the phone.”

Chapter 4
Hillary Clinton ripped off her ninja mask. It had been a hard job single handedly sabotaging the North Korean nukes, but she didn’t do easy. In her small Secretary of State Underwater Car, she breathed a sigh of relief and picked up the C.B.

“Mission accomplished.”

She was answered by only static. Unusual.

Hilary fiddled with the controls. Nothing seemed to work. The only thing she could hear were radar beeps. She checked the instruments.

Something, lots of somethings, were emerging from the ocean floor. She angled the car to get a look.

“Those look like flying saucers,” she said to herself. Hillary believed in an ever present multi-dimensional God which manifested in many forms including an external audience as well as mirror of the self with whom she routinely check in. ”I don’t believe it.”

The unidentified floating objects soared past her miniscule underwater car, casting her to and fro.

“I wish I didn’t waste all that time on that stupid nuke,” she grumbled as she prepared the underwater car to transform into a small sleath-like air craft. The Secretary of State shot out of the sea. She knew of only one place to go.

Chapter 5
Brad Pitt didn’t realize he was staying at the same hotel as John McCain, that is until the Senator crashed into his room strangling a shiny serpent-like robot.

McCain started hacking at the mechanical beast with a crude blade. Pitt didn’t know what else to do other than mute the TV. He had fallen asleep in front of it, waiting for the latest Powerball.

Chapter 6
The grizzly and grizzled Senator managed to hack off a piece of the slithering robot. A strange limb fell to the ground. Pitt jumped away like a frightened cat. Out of the dismembered metal hundreds of small snake like robots crawled, fleeing out the window.

McCain picked up the rest of the robot and threw it out the door. “There’s too many of them and when you pick one apart, hundreds replace it.”

“Like some sort of virus.” Pitt added.

“Boy, you don’t know what you’re talking about. A virus invades a host and reproduces–oh never mind. You got a car?”

“Yes,” Pitt answered, “but my license is suspended.”

McCain spotted the keys on the table and grabbed them. “Welcome to the club.”

Chapter 7Ralph Nader studiously reviewed a study on the perils of water flouridation. The radio, tuned to a contemporary jazz station, began to crackle. Nader flicked a booger off his index finger and reached for the dial. But his search for another station was interrupted by an emergency broadcast. Alien robots had invaded the planet.

The phone rang.

Nader answered.

“Yes, Mr. President.”

Pause.

“I just heard on the radio. How can I help?”

Pause.

“No, according to the ancient rules, only the current vice president can banish Cheney to Dimension 13. Where’s Biden? Oh, you want me to find the Vice-President? What’s in it for me, Barry? A cabinet job? A tax on stock trades? Holding corporations accountable?”

Nader picked his nose as he listened to President Obama’s offer.

“I think we should focus on the alien invaders. I don’t have time for petty– Cheney said what? I’ll get you Biden in 48 hours.”

Nader slammed the phone down. He went to his bookshelf and found an original copy of Unsafe at Any Speed. He pulled the book out. The book shelf opened up to what looked like a fire pole.

Nader slid down to a deep cave full of 1970s era computers and hardware. He went over to a microphone and pushed a button.

“Nader’s Raider’s, activate.”

Chapter 8Brad Pitt had starred in many movies, but none as bizarre as the adventure he had stumbled upon with Senator John McCain. As Pitt rambled down the highway, McCain sat in the passenger seat of the 1992 Honda Civic and fashioned a canon out of some items they had scrounged up, in a similar fashion, Bradley noted, to Captain Kirk in that episode of Star Trek with the lizard man.

“What are you going to do with that canon?” Pitt asked.

“Shoot at homeless people,” McCain responded.

“Really?” Pitt asked, beginning to wonder how he was going to throw this madman out of his Civic.

“No,” McCain shot back, “I’m going to hunt down and kill every one of those robot aliens. And you’re going to help.”

“Well, I’ll certainly do some of the driving,” Pitt responded.

An alien robot started running by the side of the car.

McCain, not finished with the canon, took out a PVC pipe, shoved something in it, held the pipe up to his mouth, and blew at the robotic beast. PUH! PUH!

The robot became covered with a thin powder and rendered blind. McCain opened the car door, slamming the beast. It fell.